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Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls, a novel by Juliana Horatia Ewing |
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Chapter 13. At School... |
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_ CHAPTER XIII. AT SCHOOL--THE LILAC-BUSH--BRIDGET'S POSIES--SUMMER--HEALTH We knew when it was summer at Bush House, because there was a lilac-tree by the gate, which had one large bunch of flowers on it in the summer when Eleanor and I and Matilda were at school there. As we left the house in double file to take our daily exercise on the high-road, the girls would bob their heads to catch a whiff of the scent as they passed, or to let the cool fragrant flowers brush their foreheads. On this point Madame, our French governess, remonstrated in vain. We took turns for the side next to the lilac, and sniffed away as long as there was anything to smell. Even when the delicate colour began to turn brown, and the fragrance vanished, we were loth to believe that the blossoms were fading. "I think I have got a cold in my head," said Matilda, who had plunged her nose into the cluster one day in vain. "You have a cough, ma foi! Mademoiselle Buller," replied Madame, who seemed to labour under the idea that Matilda rather enjoyed this privilege. But I had tried the lilac-bush myself with no better success. "I think," I whispered to Eleanor, in English, "that we have smelt it all up." "Parlez-vous francais, mesdemoiselles!" cried Madame, and we filed out into the dusty street, at the corner of which sat another of our visible tokens of the coming of the season of flowers; a dirty, shrivelled old Irishwoman, full of benedictions and beggary, who, all through the summer, sold "posies" to the passers-by. We school-girls were good customers to her. We were all more or less sentimental, more or less homesick, and had more or less of that susceptibility to the influence of scents which may, some day, be the basis of a new school of medicine. One girl had cultivated pinks and _Roses de Meaux_ in her own garden "at home," and Bridget was soon wise enough to discover that a nosegay composed of these materials was an irresistible temptation to that particular customer. Another had a craving for the sight and smell of southernwood (or "old man," as Eleanor called it), and preferred it in combination with bachelor's buttons. "There was an old woman 'at home' whom we used to go to tea with when we were children--my brother and I," she said; "there were such big bunches of southernwood by her cottage. And bachelor's buttons all round the garden." The brother was dead, I knew, and there were two flattened "buttons" and a bit of withered "old man" gummed into her Bible. "Picked the last day we were out together. Before he was taken ill with scarlet fever," she told me. She had the boy's portrait in a standing frame, and, little space as we had in our bedrooms, the other girls piled their brushes and ribbon-boxes on one side of the looking-glass as best they could, and left the rest of the dressing-table sacred to his picture, and to the Bible, and the jar of Bridget's flowers, which stood before the likeness as if it had been that of a patron saint. For my own part I was very ignorant of the names and properties of English flowers. I knew some by sight, from Adelaide St. Quentin's bouquets, and from my great-grandfather's sketches; and I knew the names of others of which Adolphe had given me plants, and of which I was glad to see the flower. As I had plenty of pocket-money I was a liberal customer, and I made old Bridget tell me the names of the flowers in her bunches. I have since found out that whenever she was at fault she composed a name upon the spot, with the ready wit and desire to please characteristic of her nation. These names were chiefly connected with the Blessed Virgin and the saints. "The Lord blesh ye, my dear," she would say; "that's 'Mary's flower';" or, "Sure it's the 'Blessed Virgin's spinning-wheel,' and a pretty name too!" A bitter-smelling herb which she commended to me as "Saints' Savory," I afterwards learned to be tansy. The youngest of us, a small, silent little orphan, had bought no posy till one day she quietly observed, "If you could get me a peony, I would buy it." The peony was procured; so large, so round, and so red, that some one unfeelingly suggested that it should be cut up for pickled cabbage. The little miss walked home with it in her hand, looking at it as sentimentally as if it had been a forget-me-not. As we had been hard-hearted enough to laugh at it, we never learned the history which made it dear. Madame would certainly never have allowed us to break our ranks, and chaffer with Bridget, but that some one had been lucky enough to think of giving her bouquets. Madame liked flowers--as ornaments--and was sentimental herself, after a fashion, a sentimentality of appearances. She liked a bright spot of colour on her sombre dresses too, and she was economical; for every day that she had a bright bouquet a day's wear and tear was saved to her neck-ribbons. She pinned the bright flowers by her very clean collar, and not very clean throat, and permitted us to supply ourselves also from Bridget's basket. A less pleasant sign of summer than the lilac-blossom or Bridget's flower-basket was the heat. It was hot in the dusty, draughty streets of the little town. The empty bedrooms at Bush House were like ovens, and the well-filled school-room was much worse. Madame would never hear any complaints of the heat from me or from Matilda. Summer at Bush House, in the nature of things, could be nothing to summer in India, to which we were accustomed. It was useless to point out that in India the rooms in which we lived were large, well shaded, and ventilated by constant currents of fresh air. Also that there, our heaviest meal, our longest walk, and our hardest work were not all crowded into the hottest hours of the day. "England is at no time so warm as India," said Madame. "I suppose we are not as hot as the cook," suggested little "Peony" as we now called her, one very hot day, when we sat languidly struggling through our work in the stifling atmosphere of the school-room. "I thought of her to-day when I looked at that great fat leg of roast mutton. We're better off than she is." "And she's better off than if she were in the Black Hole of Calcutta; but that doesn't make either her or us cool," said Emma Lascelles, an elder girl. "Don't preach, Peony; lessons are bad enough in this heat." "I shan't eat any dinner to-morrow, I think," said Eleanor; "I cannot keep awake after it this weather, so it's no use." "I wish I were back at Miss Martin's for the summer," said another girl. We knew to what this referred, and Madame being by a rare chance absent, we pressed for an account, in English, of Miss Martin's arrangements in the hot weather. "Miss Martin's" was a school at which this girl had been before she came to Bush House. "I can't think why on earth you left her," said Eleanor. "Well, this is nearer home for one thing, and the masters are better here, certainly. But she did take such care of us. It wasn't everlasting backaches, and headaches, and coughs, and pains in your side all along. And when the weather got hot (and it was a very warm summer when I was there), and she found we got sleepy at work after dinner, and had headaches in the afternoon, she said she thought we had better have a scrap meal in the middle of the day, and dine in the cool of the evening; and so we used to have cold rice-pudding or thick bread-and-butter, such as we should have had for tea, or anything there was, and tumblers of water, at one, and at half-past five we used to wash and dress; and then at six, just when we were getting done up with the heat and work, and yet cool enough to eat, we had dinner. I can tell you a good fat roast leg of mutton looked all right then! It cured all our headaches, and we worked twice as well, both at midday work and at getting lessons ready for next day after dinner. I know----" "Tais-toi, Lucy!" hissed Peony through her teeth. "Madame!" "Donnez-moi cette grammaire, Marguerite, s'il vous plait," said Lucy, as Madame entered. And I gave her the grammar, and we set to work again, full of envy for the domestic arrangements of Miss Martin's establishment during the dog days. If there is a point on which Eleanor and I are quite agreed, among the many points we discuss and do not always agree upon, it is that of the need for a higher education for women. But ill as I think our sex provided for in this respect, and highly as I value good teaching, I would rather send a growing girl to a Miss Martin, even for fewer "educational advantages," and let her start in life with a sound, healthy constitution and a reasonable set of nerves, than have her head crammed and her health neglected under "the first masters," and so good an overseer as "Madame" to boot. For Madame certainly made us work, and was herself indefatigable. The reckless imprudence of most girls in matters of health is proverbial, the wisdom of young matrons in this respect is not beyond reproach, and the lore which long and painful experience has given to older women is apt, like other lessons from that stern teacher, to come too late. It should at least avail to benefit their daughters, were it not that custom prescribes that they also should be kept in the dark till instructed in turn by the lamentable results of their ignorance, too often only when these are past repair. Whether, though there are many things that women have no knowledge of, and many more of which their knowledge is superficial, their lack of learning on these points being erudition compared with their crass ignorance of the laws of health, the matter is again one of education; or whether it is an unfortunate development of a confusion between ignorance and innocence, and of mistaken notions of delicacy, who shall say? Unhappily, a studied ignorance of the ills that flesh is heir to is apt to bring them in double force about one's ears, and this kind of delicate-mindedness to bring delicacy of body in its train. Where it guides the counsels of those in charge of numbers of young people (as in Miss Mulberry's case), it is apt to result in the delicacy (more or less permanent) of several bodies. But I am forgetting that I am not "preaching" to Eleanor by the kitchen fire, but writing my autobiography. I am forgetting, also, that I have not yet said who Miss Mulberry was. _ |
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